Background: I took a complimentary class with a loyal client of the studio a few weeks ago. I…read moredidn't know reservations were required, but was very appreciative of the owner's invitation to attend, despite the full class. Karl was supportive, positive, professional and both trainers gave individualized attention to the 11 people in the room. The classes really should be more like 6-7 people for the space though, and they could have spent more time demonstrating the circuit to help people avoid injury since it's faster-paced. Overall, good trainers, accommodating and challenging. I've been planning to purchase a bulk package for the year so I could attend on Saturdays with my friend, and in the meantime, I actively engaged with the Instagram page, trying out their exercises on my own, liking their posts, and recommending it to two of my own clients and a friend, just after the one session.
However, as a business in 2017, how you interact with the public on social media is critical. Their Instagram is a nice extension of what they do in the classes, but I started to find some of their meat shaming rhetoric offensive (and PS: I'm not alone in this). I am not anti-vegan, simply a strong advocate for food and body positivity-- there are lots of ways to practice a healthy lifestyle. So I spoke out, letting them know that I found the tone to be repelling, and that it made me question whether the studio was the right fit for me. I shared my own negative experience as a vegan and pointed out that there needs to be substantiated evidence on the claim that "dead animals" cause inflammation of one's olfactory senses. If you're in the business of handling people's health, peer-reviewed, evidence-based, clinical science is kind of important...
Perhaps my comment lacked decorum, but nonetheless, there is a way to handle negative comments productively-- they could have easily won me over with a single sentence. But instead, the business chose to become defensive, argumentative, and hostile, engaging in downright school yard bullying tactics. The business exploded my feed, strategically singling out dozens of my photos of unhealthy, caloric dense, meaty celebratory meals, and liking them; a passive aggressive move, as if pointedly saying, "Oh yeah, you wanna say something negative about OUR food choices, fatty?" Then, one of their clients surpassed the passive aggressive by directly calling me fat, lazy and a sugar/ saturated fat addict, making gross assumptions about my eating, body and workout habits, which the business tolerated and agreed with. All because I expressed the fact that I found the tone of her post to be insulting.
You are supposed to be in the line of lifting people up and inspiring them. And while there's always some annoyingly sensitive PC client who takes offense to *something* (and perhaps that was me this time) how you handle people who express dissenting opinions is revelatory, and in this case, it demonstrates a severe lack of professionalism, insensitivity, and a disturbing vein of intolerance pulsing beneath the veneer of an otherwise decent studio.
